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Even before a single vote is taken, the political battle lines are being drawn over higher taxes — particularly on higher-income households and corporations — to balance Oregon's sagging state budget.Depending on legislative action, those battle lines could extend to Oregon's voters, if opponents have their way.

PORTLAND -- Gov. Ted Kulongoski spoke like a chief executive, and not a political candidate, in a speech Friday before the influential Portland City Club.
But after recapping his achievements as governor, Kulongoski told reporters that he's serious about seeking re-election.
"I'm out there raising money," Kulongoski said. "I'm out there all over the state. People won't return my calls any more because they know why I'm calling."
Asked why he hasn't made any public declarations that he's running for re-election, Kulongoski said, "We're working on it."

PORTLAND -- The Oregon AFL-CIO picked a soft-spoken diplomat Tuesday to shepherd the divided labor movement through troubled times.
Tom Chamberlain, a career firefighter and labor adviser to Gov. Ted Kulongoski, was named to succeed Tim Nesbitt, who resigned midterm as the federation's president after a national labor rift lopped 40 percent of his membership and funding.

Can a good defense trump a good offense?
Oregon's largest state-worker and teachers unions hope to find that out next year. They recently submitted a 2006 ballot measure that could take the wind out of a state-spending limitation offered by two conservative groups.
The new initiative petition by the Service Employees International Union Local 503 and the Oregon Education Association would exempt state spending on schools, universities, health care, senior services and public safety from any constitutional spending limits.

The Oregon AFL-CIO has slashed its budget and eliminated one-third of its paid staff to cope with the defection of several unions to a rival labor coalition.
The reorganization comes as the breakaway unions, including the largest state workers union in Oregon, meet today in St. Louis, Mo., for the founding convention of their Change to Win Coalition.
"Any organization that faces a loss in revenue as large as 40 percent has to do some radical restructuring, and we've done that," said Oregon AFL-CIO President Tim Nesbitt.

FreedomWorks, led in Oregon by Keizer resident Russ Walker, is emerging as the state's new ballot-measure powerhouse on the right.
Walker is pushing three major initiatives for the 2006 ballot: a strict state-spending cap, crimping union spending on politics, and making it easier to elect rural and conservative judges to the state's two highest courts.
"It's a response to the lack of action we feel we get from the Oregon Legislature and the governor's office," Walker said. "I think that's the reason you see many conservative organizations using the ballot measure."

Four no-new-taxes conservatives were nominated Saturday by Marion County Republicans to the Oregon House seat left vacant by the resignation of Dan Doyle.
The four nominees, all from Salem, were:
Chris Bishop, 31, a lawyer in the Salem firm of Kevin Mannix, the current state Republican Party chairman and a former legislator.
Kevin Cameron, 48, owner of Cafe Today, which has restaurants in the basement of the Capitol and other locations.

When northeast Salem's Nomi Pearce received a nasty campaign mailer Saturday depicting Democrat Betty Komp with a Pinocchio nose, she thought nothing of it and tossed it into the recycling bin.
But a recent phone "poll" on the House District 22 race between Komp and Republican Al Shannon angered Pearce. The caller cited negative things about Komp and accused her of pushing a homosexual agenda in Oregon.
"I expect to get information in print or on TV that is very biased," Pearce said. "This felt very different."

People traveling 3,000 miles for a political convention often are accused of being married to politics.
In the case of Oregon’s 59-member delegation to the 2004 Republican National Convention, many are also married to each other.
One-third of the Oregonians heading to New York City as delegates or alternates are husband-and-wife duos. Three of the 10 couples are from Salem.
“We’re a family-oriented party,” said Russ Walker, a delegate from Keizer and Northwest director for the political group Citizens for a Sound Economy/FreedomWorks.

A new coalition, consisting largely of conservative critics, wants to change how the Oregon Legislature puts together the two-year state budget.
The New Budget Coalition counts members of the Republican, Libertarian and Constitution parties among its founders, as well as the Taxpayer Association of Oregon and FreedomWorks.
Coalition spokesman Tom Cox of Hillsboro, Libertarian candidate for an Oregon House seat and its 2002 nominee for governor, said Democrats also will be sought.